I just watched the 1972 Soviet science fiction film / psychological drama, Solaris, and enjoying a sense of mind = blown strongly reminiscent of M1's M∞'s writing. The aesthetic, too, reminded me of M1, especially in terms of the slow and deliberate pacing. For a film with a near complete absence of violence and gore, it certainly felt very Marathon. Or this is the only community I'm part of that I can think of that would appreciate it, anyway.

The picture patrick posted is of Stanislaw Lem, the Polish science fiction writer whose book Solaris inspired Tarkovsky's Solaris (similarly, the click Catrikp clipped is from Tarkovsky's Stalker which was inspired by the book Roadside Picnic by Russian science fiction writers Boris & Arkady Strugatsky, all of which I highly recommend).

Although personally I would never make the connection between Marathon and Solaris. Is Marathon slow paced? I guess maybe once you've killed everyone and you're hunting for the last switch? But the source of antagonism is so different in each of those stories, I find it hard to see parallels.

philtron wrote:Although personally I would never make the connection between Marathon and Solaris. Is Marathon slow paced? I guess maybe once you've killed everyone and you're hunting for the last switch? But the source of antagonism is so different in each of those stories, I find it hard to see parallels.

Original Marathon has a lot of lonely wandering through corridors. Both the Marathon and the Solaris Station have that retro-future look, with plenty of things broken or not working (albeit for different reasons).

The source of antagonism, as I consider it in Solaris, isn't so much the alien as it is trying to understand what is reality. The protagonists' dreams are coming to life and haunting them, they question whether what they see is real or a hallucination, and what are the consequences of their interaction with supposed unreality?

These issues are always on my mind when I play Infinity- we bounce through different timelines, but do our actions have impact in the other versions of reality? We dream, but the monsters in our dreams can kill us, and we retain items we gain in our dreams into reality, so are we really dreaming? If not, than what is happening? Are we hallucinating?

Most pertinent of all, are the invisible S'pht'Kr, tick-hunting enforcers, and other dream monsters real, or apparitions? Or are they manifestations of the vast, unknowable consciousness emerging from Lh'owon's sun, just as the ghosts of Solaris station may be manifestations of the vast, unknowable consciousness living in the Solaris ocean?

Andrei Tarkovsky wrote:The brutality and low acting skills are unfortunate, but as a vision of the future and the relation between man and his destiny, mararthon is pushing the frontier of computer games as an art.